This patent has zero practical impact.
When the patent was written there was no Unicode support, so the
implementation translates the input into lists of integers instead of
lists of characters. Crucially this step was also written into all
three independent claims (which are the only bit of a patent that
actually matters). So you are free to re-implement this algorithm
provided that you manipulate lists of characters rather than lists of
integers. Now that GHC has full unicode support this should not be a
problem.
Paul.